The Arkansaw traveler., 1887-05-28
GRANTS GRAMMER.
[ TENchange.

The following is an address deliv- cred by Mark Twain at an army and navy reunion at Hartford, Conn.,, on Wednesday evening:
 "I will detain you with only few words-just few thousand words, and then give place to better man if he has been created. Lately great and honored author, Matthew Arnold, has been finding fault with General Grants English. That would be fair enough, may be, if the examples of imperfect English averaged more in- stances to the page in General Grants book than they do i'll MT. Arnold's criticism upon the book-but they don't. It would be fair enough, may be, if such instances were commoner in General Grants book than they are in the works of the average standard author-but they are not. In truth, General Grants dereliction in the mat ter of 9rammer and construction are not more frequent than are such de- reflection in the works of a majority of the professional authors of our time and of all previous times-authors as exclusively and painstaking trained to the literary trade as was General Grant to the trade of war. This is not a ran dom statement: it is fact. and easily demonstrable. I have at home book called "Modern English Literature; its Blemishes and Defects" by Henry II. Breen, F. s. A., a countryman of Mir. Arnold. In it find examples of bad grammer and slovenly English from the pens of Sydney Smith, Sher- idan, Hallam. Whately, Carlyle, both Disraelis, Allison, Junius, Blair, Ma cauley, Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, Bulwer, Cabbett, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Trench, Lamb, Landor, Smollet, Wal pole, Walker (of the dictionary, Christopher, North, Kirke White, Mrs. Sigourney, Benjamin Franklin, Walter Scott and Mir. Lindley Murray who made the grammar.
 In Mir. Arnold's paper on General Grants book we find a couple of gram nautical crimes and more than several examples of very crude and slovenly English-enough of them to easily entitle him to lofty place in that il- lustrious list of delinquents just named. The following passage, all by itself, ought to elect him: ''Meade suggested to Grant that he might wish to have immediately under him Sher- man, who had been serving withGrant in the west. He begged him not to hesitate if he thought it for the good of the service. Grant assured him that he had not thought of removing him, and in his memoirs, after relating what had passed. he adds." etc. To read that passage couple of times would make man dizzy; to read it four times would make him drunk.
 General Grants grammar is as good as nybody's: but if this were not so, Mir. B-een would brush that incense qgential fact aside and hunt his great book for far higher game. Mir. Breen makes this discriminating remark : |" To suppose that because man is a poet or historian he must be corrected in his grammar is to suppose that an architect must be a joiner or physi- elan or compounder of medicines - MT. Breen's point is we'll taken. If you should climb the mighty Natter horn to look out over the kingdoms of the earth it might be pleasant in- cident to find strawberries up there: :: but, great Scott, you don't climb Mat terhorn for strawberries! I don't think Mir. Arnold was quite wise, for he well knew that that Briton or American was never yet born who could safely assault another mans English. He knew as well as he knows nothing that the man never lived whose English was fiawless. Can you believe that Mir. Arnold was immodest enough to imagine himself an excep- ton to this cast-iron rule, the sole ex- eeption discoverable within the three or four centuries during which the English language proper has been in existence? No. MT. Arnold did not